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Comment by nathancahill | Hacker News Reader

Here's a thought exercise: how will this trend be exacerbated by the Electron/Chromium stack? Should Mozilla develop a competing engine for "native" apps?

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Mozilla is developing a competing engine for native apps. The word "embedded" is part of Servo's [1] elevator pitch:

Servo is a modern, high-performance browser engine designed for both application and embedded use.

Sponsored by Mozilla and written in the new systems programming language Rust, the Servo project aims to achieve better parallelism, security, modularity, and performance.

[1] https://servo.org/

EDIT seeing Etzos's answer, I see better what you meant (de-facto "standardizing" around electron). positron looks like a better answer then. But long term, there's clear interest from Servo developers, see http://blog.servo.org/2015/05/01/forward/ and Ctrl+F for "Chromium Embedded Framework"

Great. I'd prefer to see Servo and browser.html replace the heavy Electron stack.

How light is servo + browser.html? you seem to be implying it's much less than electron. Any figures? I haven't looked at Servo / browser.html / rust at all apart from seeing a few news articles pop up on HN the last few months.

Hard to say since it's still in development. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in. But it's focus is on parallelism and performance, so I have high hopes. Slack (a flagship of Electron apps) is currently using 850mb of ram, idle in the background. Firefox with 50 tabs open is using the same amount.

Holy crap! 850MB for a chat client!? Just made the argument for truly, native apps right there.

See this demo comparing Chrome, Firefox and Servo WebRender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hYIRQRiws Servo WebRender uses the GPU making it much faster than classic renderers (besides CPU parallelism), think of it like a Webbrowser using Video Gaming technology.

There's a talk about this at https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11175258)

browser.html is just the current "skin" for Servo.

Any tests done on integrated graphics such as those in normal laptops?

In https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/ ,

- At 03:00: pcwalton explains how this experiment leans on the GPU-ization of our Intel CPUs since Haswell.

- At 14:50: slide says "WebRender supports OpenGL ES 2.1 and OpenGL 3.x"

- "Benchmarks" at 26:00 running on his macbook, which may fit what you are looking for

TL;DR, yes this early work is for "integrated graphics such as those in normal laptops". Or try it yourself on your laptop with a nightly build: http://blog.servo.org/2016/06/30/servo-nightlies/

It works awesomely on both integrated and discrete graphics for me. IIRC Patrick and Glenn, the people who wrote webrender, by default use integrated graphics anyway (at least one of them does).

Software rendering makes it choke sometimes (other times it works surprisingly smoothly, but it depends on the load), but that is to be expected :)

I think the grandparent was referring to things like startup speed and memory consumption when they said "lighter", not rendering performance.

Servo is super long term; it is more of a testing ground than a product. It is possible that it will become a product in the future, and embedding is a really lucrative space for us to try, but no plans for a product right now.

Positron is indeed the thing you are looking for.

They are actually already doing this[1].

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/positron

Don't forget Cordova where most views are also Chrome based. (The exception being Windows, by default, and many don't seem to test on Windows.)

Obviously Mozilla tried and failed with Firefox OS to play in that market at the mobile level.

It might be nice to see an Electron and/or Cordova-compatible view engine from Mozilla, but I'm not sure how much adoption or testing it would see unless it became the default (and even then you probably would have a bunch of web developers revert to Chrome views simply because its comfortable to what they know).

Mozilla actually had one for years, called XULRunner.

It's not good; people use Electron instead of XULRunner because XULRunner was barely maintained. It would randomly stop working on major Firefox releases, and would stay broken for weeks, because nobody noticed or cared that XULRunner didn't work, as long as core Firefox kept working.

Even when it did work, working with XPCOM sucked.

Positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron is the new XULRunner. WIP, doesn't actually work yet. :-(

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